Deborah Elizabeth Whaley - With/Out Sanctuary

Teaching Race, Trauma, and Collective Memory through Photography in a Graduate Humanities Course

In 1911, a Midwestern
Black woman, Laura Nelson, came to the aid of her son, L.W. Nelson, who was
accused and convicted -- without any deliberation or trial -- of killing an
Oklahoma police deputy. Mrs. Nelson confessed to the deputy shooting in an
attempt to stall her son’s fate, and as a result, both mother and son were
imprisoned for the crime. On a May afternoon, Laura Nelson and L.W. Nelson were
kidnapped from their respective prison cells, gagged with torn sack fabric, and
hung from a bridge above the Canadian River. The two bodies dangled midway above
the river-- listless and limp as they choked to their eventual deaths. For weeks
after, hundreds of townspeople from the western region of Okemah, Oklahoma
visited the bridge to view the hanging bodies and to have their picture taken on
the bridge as they smiled and looked down upon Mrs. Nelson’s and L.W. Nelson's
hanging Black bodies. Not until the rope around the dead carcasses’ necks gave
way and the bodies dropped to the bottom of the river did white spectators cease
to visit the execution site, which up until that point existed as a central site
of the lynch mob’s amusement.

In 1918, an eight-month pregnant Black
woman, Mary Turner, expressed in public that she would work to ensure the lynch
mob who murdered her husband would meet their punishment in a court of law. In
response to Turner’s public threat to hold the lynchers accountable for their
crime, a white mob kidnapped Mary Turner, roped her ankles together, and tied
her to the limb of a tree. While forcing her head downwards, the lynch mob
drenched her clothing with gasoline and lit her dress afire. Barely alive,
Turner's burned body quivered while a member of the mob took a sharp hunting
knife and cut the eight-month-old pregnancy from her womb. When the fetus
dropped from Mary Turner’s hanging, burnt blackened body, another member of the
mob stomped his boot on the fetus’ head and crushed it beyond recognition. Days
after, the Associated Press reported that although Mary Turner was dead, white
Georgians remained upset over her imprudent remarks as well as her indolent
attitude.(1)

Introduction

When the exhibition based on James
Allen’s collection of lynching postcards, Without Sanctuary: Lynching
Photography in America opened, and Twin Publishers released its accompanying
book, it re-ignited a dim fire under the horrors of lynching in the U.S., and
the disparate race, gender, and sexual relations that informed them. The history
of lynching and its historical precedents is well known and documented in
historical writing. (2) Yet, the Allen collection of lynching photos stands out
as distinct because its collection primarily consists of postcards exchanged by
living human beings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On
these postcards, commentary on the backside spoke of general events and
amusements curiously detached from the heinous visual image on the front side.
Postcards that did acknowledge the front image expressed that the lynched body
was an assumed thief, rapist, or simply stated that there had been a “Negro
barbecue” or “coon cooking” that evening. As one correspondent jubilantly wrote
to his father on the backside of a lynching postcard in 1916: “This is the
barbecue we had last night; my picture is to the left with a cross over it, your
son Joe.”

Joe’s postcard documents the prevalent description of Black
bodies as a process of digestive consumption. Through the exchange of these
images in the postal mail, recipients of the postcards re-consumed them in the
open, free market. Joe’s backside commentary inscribes lynching postcards as
commodities for exchange, which documents the demise of another human being. In
1911, distribution of lynching postcards through the postal mail became illegal.
Nevertheless, this did not stop their production, demand, or trade. To the
contrary, the law facilitated an underground trade market to emerge and
flourish, where members of lynch mobs and willing spectators continued to
exchange proof of their assumed racial superiority and their unquestionable
power over the lives of Black Americans. As James Allen writes, the exchange of
lynching postcards in the nineteenth and twentieth century reveal “the lust
propelled by the commercial reproduction and distribution of the images,” which
worked to “facilitate the endless replay of anguish.” “Even dead,” writes Allen,
“the victims were without sanctuary.” (3)

This paper consists of
reflections on teaching disturbing racial imagery in American life within the
context of race, trauma, and collective memory in a graduate American Studies
course at a doctoral granting, urban public university in the New England region
of the United States. I argue hereon that lynching postcards and similar visual
documentation are a useful pedagogical tool in casting attention to the
attitudes that led to these extra-legal (i.e., outside of the law) executions.
In view of the horrid nature of the act of lynching, the graphic content of the
photographs that documented them, and the inhumanity suggested in their postal
exchange, what pedagogical function do lynching postcards serve other than the
recapitulation of guilt, national shame, and anger? Lynching postcards are
relevant for examination and worth pedagogical consideration because they are
tangible examples of remorseless racism. By remembering lynching, discussing
the exchange of lynching postcards, and locating modern manifestations of the
attitudes that gave birth to these and other odious acts of violence, the
possibility of isolating and not repeating subtle and overt forms of racism
becomes a probability. As a pedagogy piece written in the name of social justice
in education, this paper makes no claims to recapitulating the history of
lynching, nor do I present a review of the extant literature on lynching.
Rather, I utilize the photography exhibition Without Sanctuary and its
exhibition catalogue essays as a starting point to explore pedagogical
approaches to teaching visual images of race, ethnicity, and national identity
“without,” as Stuart Hall writes of the uneasy materialist work of anti-racist
cultural transformation and counter knowledge production, “guarantees.” (4)

That is to say, this paper assumes teaching about/of race is a process of
struggle without easy resolve and guarantees of success ahead of time. It
accepts as a working premise that pedagogical experiences are an unfinished
process completed, at times, years after the initial experience. Notwithstanding
the lack of assurance in the success of any one pedagogical approach, I draw on
the interdisciplinary outcome that emerges from encouraging and directing
diverse skill development with photographic images. I begin with a discussion of
lynching postcards and a review of the voices that provided the narrative for
their recent exhibition. Next, by walking through a term assignment I developed
for graduate students on this subject, I explore the problems and possibilities
that focusing on race, trauma, and collective memory through visual images
enable for students. Thus, the first part of the paper provides a context to
understand the complex meanings that the images invoke as forms of material
culture and as objects of mass consumption. The final portion of the paper uses
student voices and projects to report on the interdisciplinary methodology and
multi-cultural literacy developed after the completion of the assignment.

Bittersweet Profits and Bitter Still Prophets: The Struggle to Make Sense
and Meaning of Lynching Postcards

Cultural critic Farah Griffin observes
in the documentary Strange Fruit, which critically explores the cultural work of
singer Billie Holiday’s song of the same title, that a latent script exists in
images of lynching. Rarely, observes Griffin, were the lynched guilty of the
crime purposed by mobs. Lynching thus emerged as “ways to police Black
communities when there was a sense that Black people were making too many
economic and political gains.” (5) In January of 2000, the exhibition Without
Sanctuary opened in a small gallery on Manhattan’s east side of New York and
transformed the hidden scripts Griffin refers to into monstrous, intertextual
artifacts for racially mixed audiences. The exhibition drew thousands of
spectators, thus forcing the collection to move to New York’s Historical Society
building and prompting a subsequent national tour. Four voices, collector James
Allen, New Yorker journalist Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and historian
Leon F. Litwack illuminate modern spectators’ relationship to the exhibition of
lynching postcards and to the controversy the exhibition caused in Twin
Publishers hardbound installation catalogue. The authors blend self-reflexive
narratives, cultural contexts, historical precedents, and aesthetic
interpretations to unpack the complex meanings and current relevance of an
under-examined area in the history of lynching.

Without Sanctuary’s
authors attest that while sexual transgression or sexual jealousy was often the
underpin of the ideology that justified lynching, the assumed offenses of Black
Americans that preceded their lynch-pin death also consisted of acts that broke
the unspoken racial code created in the dominant culture’s imagination. As Leon
Litwack, a historian of African American history and author of several articles
and books on lynching explains:

Many of the transgressions by Blacks
would have been regarded as relatively trivial if committed by whites and were
not grounds anywhere else for capital punishment: using disrespectful,
insulting, boastful, threatening, or incendiary language; insubordination,
impertinence, or improper demeanor (a sarcastic grin, laughing at the wrong
time, a prolonged silence)…being troublesome…and (in the eye’s of whites) trying
to act like a white man. (6)

The psychological and behavioral framework
Litwack adds to the lynching story explains the multiple reasons they occurred
throughout history. Yet, in Litwack’s analysis of post mortem lynch sites, he
also adds description about the thoughtlessness that took place after Black men
and women were illegally disposed of through the lyncher’s tortuous rope. Again,
writes Litwack, “What ever their values as laborers, Black people were clearly
expendable and replaceable in the Antebellum era.” (7) Expendable they were
indeed, and for the lynch mob, news of the lynched body and efforts to captivate
the proud acts via photography and to disseminate those images were immediate.
For example, in the lynching of Thomas Brooks, a Black man in Tennessee, the
lynchers’ haste to trade evidence of their act was a chilling site of what one
might consider Bakhtinian (8) carnivalesque:

Hundreds of Kodaks clicked
all morning at the scene of Thomas Brooks’ lynching. People in automobiles and
carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a
rope… Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the
bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of a
lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of
country schools the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could
get back from viewing the lynched man. (9)

The Without Sanctuary
exhibition and accompanying text did not situate lynching in the past alone, as
it exposed the feelings and violence that gave rise to lynching as an ongoing
(though certainly transformed) process within current social relations. Hilton
Als, a writer and reporter for the New Yorker, explains that there are
intertextual connections between the history of lynching and current social
relations between Black men and women and white Americans. In his writing about
how the exhibition affected him as a Black male spectator, Als reveals that in
the photographs and postcards he re-viewed an existential reincarnation of
himself: “I am not dead” as the bodies in the photographs, explains Als, “but I
have been looked at, watched, and it’s the experience of being watched, and
seeing the harm in people’s eyes—that prelude to becoming a dead nigger.” “What
is the relationship,” he asks as a Black male intellectual and writer, “of the
white people in these pictures to the white people who ask me and sometimes pay
me to be [their] Negro?” (10)

Similar to Litwack and other historians of
lynching in the U.S., Als reveals that the idea behind the lynch mob mentality
is to deny the inhumanity of the act by dehumanizing the victim, exacerbating
and manufacturing their guilt, and legitimating and affirming their right to use
extra-legal means as a tool to silence dissent and assert social control.
Lynching is a dialectic between not only the lynchers, lynched, and the whites
that stand by and watch then, but lynching is also a dialectic between the
lynched and the members of the group who identify with the mutilated body
racially, culturally, or ideologically. Because lynching is a means of social
control, essential to the act is to intimidate others who might cross and
transgress similar boundaries. Als uses the example of lynching to suggest that
in our current racial milieu, this leads historically marginalized groups to
“exercise a similar sensitivity where white people are concerned, [in order] to
avoid being lynched by their tongues or eyes.” (11) On this form of
intimidation, Als asks the reader/viewer to consider the trauma that the
families of the lynched throughout history incurred, too. He writes: “Did the
families in these pictures stand at the periphery and wait for it all to be
over, when someone, maybe the youngest among them, could climb the tree and cut
Cousin or Mother or Father down?” (12)

In the essay, “Can You Be Black
and Look at This?” cultural critic Elizabeth Alexander uses the example of the
1955 murder of Emmet Till and the 1991 beating of Rodney King to illustrate that
as witnesses to acts of violence against Black Americans, family members and
other Black members of that community are left with the collective memory of the
event and therefore bear the hidden text of the act in their own flesh. Those of
this group that are not physical witnesses, she writes, become witnesses
nonetheless by ocular means; they know the truth of the story behind the
lynching. (13) Family members of the lynched and their compatriots are the
historical actors absent from lynching photographs--these warriors went on and
tried to recover after the murder of consanguine or direct-blood kin.

While Litwack provides a historical lens and Als a more personal, insurgent
one, the collector of the images answers the questions that literature on
lynching up until recently did not address, that is, their commodification. As a
collector of material culture, James Allen came upon the postcard collection by
accident while at a rummage sale in search of antiques and miscellaneous
artifacts. Allen recalls:

A trader pulled me aside at the flea market
and in conspiratorial tones offered to sell me a real photo postcard. It was
Laura Nelson hanging from a bridge…that image of Laura layered a pall of grief
over all my fears. I believe the photographer was more than a perceptive
spectator at the lynching. Indeed, the photographic art played as significant a
role in the ritual as torture or souvenir. Studying these photographs has
engendered in me a caution of whites, of the majority, of the young, of
religion, of the accepted. (14)

What does the consumption of the images
as postcards and currently in the form of their recent exhibition offer
historians and cultural critics in thinking through the linkages between
transformative pedagogy, aesthetics, production, and consumption? An examination
of the consumption and trade of lynching postcards among different racial groups
provide at least two competing narratives of their social, cultural, and
political function. These narratives help one see lynching postcards as more
than tools of spectacle and cultural hegemony. Postcards of lynchings certainly
became a form of braggadocio for those who condoned these mass-inflicted
executions. Lesser known, however, is that Black Americans would also use and
send lynching postcards for alternative means to warn, document, and disseminate
news about them to family, relatives, and friends, so that they too would know
about the unlawful executions.

Audio of Songs Protesting Lynching

Such was the case with the postcard in the collection that documents the 1908
hanging of three brothers: Virgil, Robert, and Thomas Jones. On the backside of
the lynching postcard, the sender writes, “I bought this in Hopkinsville, 15
cents each. They are not on sale openly…I read an account of the night riders
affairs where it says these men were hung without any apparent cause or reason
whatsoever.” (15) The written inscription of the sender is key to understanding
the complexity of lynching postcards in their trade. On the front side of the
postcard, there is a rationalization for the Jones’ brothers lynching via a
caption beneath the photo, which claims the three men assaulted a white woman.
In contrast, this particular sender acts as a conduit of truth, by sharing with
the intended recipient that the lynching and the proposed crime was unfounded
based on counter information. In addition, the sender’s inclusion that the
postcards were on sale through a discreet, underground market to white and Black
Americans, show that the consumers of lynching postcards changed and
particularized their own meanings of what the postcards meant.

For those
who chose to act as an insurgent witness against lynching, they could do so by
buying them secretly for different means and ends. Black American’s
dissemination of the cards created an alternative form of collective memory from
the accounts dispersed by those whites who wished to contain and restrain Black
citizens through acts of harassment and torture. As forms of material culture
then, lynching postcards serve different psychological and cultural functions
for the collector based on their subject positions, intention of use, and
worldview. The exhibition catalog Without Sanctuary the text encouraged new
witnesses to come to terms with historical and current manifestations of racism
and lynching. The exhibition Without Sanctuary traveled across the nation to
document, teach, and share the possibilities that arise from mixing
self-reflexive text with visual documentation.

New Witnesses: The
Challenges and Prospects of Teaching Race, Trauma, and Collective Memory through
Photography

After teaching a graduate course on race, ethnicity, and
nation for the first time a few years ago, I began to rethink ways to help
students – the large majority of whom were white – draw connections between
theories of race and how racial attitudes pervade individual consciousness and
hold material consequences for historically marginalized groups. At the time,
the Without Sanctuary exhibition had recently moved to the University of Georgia
and was at the tale of its national tour. Its stop in Athens, GA was
particularly controversial because the state of Georgia was the site where
several of the lynchings pictured in the exhibition took place. For university
students and other visitors at the University of Georgia exhibition, lynching
leaped from the pages of history books and became horrifically real. The names
of those lynched, women like Laura Nelson and men like the Jones brothers,
became human beings instead of dead, burnt, hanging black bodies. With their
narratives placed alongside the postcards, which often included the backside
note and salutations on the cards, the intent of the perpetuators became ever
more clear. Those who exchanged lynching postcards were not impotent bystanders;
whether good or bad in their intentions, they were social actors and historical
agents whose actions or inaction had material effects.

These narratives
would hold relevance for students in ways that might invoke self-reflection and
humanistic learning. As objects produced for consumption and re-consumption
through monetary and then free trade via the postal mail, lynching postcards
carry the potential to serve several vital pedagogical functions. Lynching
postcards tell a didactic, multi-layered story of race, trauma, and collective
memory. These postcards also mark a significant historical moment of violence
against a historically marginalized group during a moment when Black
Americans’ status, not to mention the lynchers’ status, was unstable and in flux.
Lynching is just one example where one might connect the overlapping concerns of
race, trauma, and collective memory.

Peter Nien-chu Kiang, a professor
of Asian American Studies, American Studies, and Education explains his
experience in using a particular historical event—Japanese internment in WWII—as
a lens to open up issues concerning race, nation, and class struggle in a
graduate course. His intent was to maintain personal commitments to
transformation within an intellectual context to a largely homogenous graduate
student body, while still providing for student voice and instructor
self-reflexivity:

During my first semester…graduate students in my
weekly social studies design course openly rebelled after the first class
meeting, in which I described my broad commitment to antiracist, multicultural
education and my specific intent to use the Japanese American internment
experience as the focus [for the course]. [But] . . .by using oral histories,
poems, video excerpts, role plays, and reflective writing activities within our
own class, I . . . moved many students. . . .As a result, they began to reflect
more critically and concretely about their own responsibilities to become
effective teachers. (16)

Kiang speaks of the complications, challenges,
and resistance that arise when teaching and training white adults to function
effectively in a multi-culture, multi-lingual, and poly-national nation state.
He also implicitly suggests that subject position of the teacher and student
shapes the discussion and reception of this work within a material context.
Kiang’s narrative shows an earnest concern for his students despite difficult
racial dynamics. A host of texts, anthologies, and essays suggest that the above
experience is common for minority and non-minority professors with
transformative intents. (17) However, Kiang was able to intensify students’
multi-cultural literacy and cognitive sophistication through the case study of
Japanese Internment. Furthermore, publishing his account provided an important
model for teachers and students alike to realize pedagogical transformation
against the odds.

Pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire writes that
transformative education emanates from educators who humble themselves in order
to learn from their students. He prescribes that educators avoid the ‘banking
method of education,’ where a perceived expert transmits knowledge into an empty
receptor. “The banking method of education,” writes Freire, “will never propose
to students that they critically consider reality.” (18) Thus, a trusting
teacher/learner realizes that it is necessary to step back from a learning
environment, in order for learning to step forward for students. My own goal in
teaching about race, trauma, and collective memory was the following: How could
I structure the classroom so our predominantly white students and their ideas
might emerge as central where they had the opportunity to grapple with the
difficult material in our course that focused on race, ethnicity, and nation?

As a way to speak to this concern and in the tradition and spirit of
Kiang’s and Freire’s critical and transgressive teaching methods, I designed a
term assignment to facilitate students to engage in the type of critique found
in the Without Sanctuary exhibition catalogue. The richness of the varied
voices—that of the collector, journalist, historian, politician, and critic
provided us with muscular written examples of interdisciplinary writing about
the very difficult subject the class was to grapple with: race, trauma, and
collective memory. Through this term assignment, students would have the
opportunity to use the course to think through the many dimensions of race and
at the same time hone skill development in vital areas in humanities training:
aesthetic, cultural, historical, and self-reflexive analysis. The aim of the
assignment was to encourage students to think through race and ethnic relations
from an interdisciplinary and personal standpoint, instead of within an
adversarial relationship with the groups under examination, not to mention the
person in a position to grade and evaluate their work. The structure of the
assignment would situate students as producers of original cultural knowledge on
issues of race, ethnicity, and nation from a variety of frameworks.

Students would likely know of the general history of lynching, especially as
this was a graduate course. However, I structured the assignment so that
students might delve deeper into the psychology behind more ambiguous historical
actors Hilton Als refers to in Without Sanctuary’s lynching story. This would
include actions that do not necessarily classify as overt forms of racism. For
example, what of those who snapped the troublesome pictures, looked on and did
not act, smiled on at the hanging carcasses, traded lynching cards, or received
them in the postal mail with anticipation? What of those who imagined that the
demise of one Black body would allow them to rise as central and triumphant? As
cultural critics, what might one learn from Black Americans who used lynching
postcards for subversive means? The aforementioned historical actors and
questions point to a host of un-resolvable contradictions much more ambivalent
than the assumed outright racism of the actual ‘lynchers.’ Students were thus
encouraged to collectively grapple with these contradictions in their own
writings about images that document race and ensuing trauma experienced by a
historically marginalized group, however aesthetically subtle or brutally
graphic in their photographic documentation.

The images chosen by
students, like lynching photography, might allow for the tangible evidence of
racial inequities and would avoid the epistemological solipsism that at times
results from the reading of purely written texts (i.e., if I don’t see it or
experience it, it does not exist position). The only restriction in the
assignment insofar as the actual imagery chosen was that students not choose
lynching photography for examination, since this was the textual example they
were to use as a point of departure. The assignment required that students find
find images that document racial violence and the ensuing collective response by
a variety of ethnic groups, including but not limited to: the white working
class, Latinos, Asian Americans, African Americans, Euro-ethnic groups, American
Indians, and Arab or Middle Eastern Americans. Of great importance in the
writing about these images was to consider how the writer (students) sees
themselves within the middle of the contradictions the images pose, as
spectators, as historical actors, and as agents. The precise assignment was as
follows:

The final project asks you to incorporate the objectives for
this course into one 20-30 page written and multi-media project on the subject
of American nationalism, ethnicity, and racialization. This collaborative
project requires that you work with another student. After reading, viewing, and
digesting Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America and our
readings on race, trauma, and collective memory, you will try your hand at the
cultural and historical analysis of controversial racial imagery in American
life. You will take two photographic images of race and trauma and juxtapose the
images’ representational, historic, political, and cultural meanings. Students
will combine their visual images, written analysis, and other forms of
multi-media into one portfolio per group. You might think of this assignment as
an opportunity to try your hand at well-written historical, cultural, and visual
interpretation in a detailed, succinct manner--a writing exercise that may help
you with your MA degree project, curriculum development, or MA internship.

I included that the intended outcome of their collaborative venture and
written portfolio was four-fold: 1) First, students will acquire the
skills to write about visual imagery in three primary ways (aesthetic, cultural,
historical). 2) Second, the written portion will prompt ways to think
self-reflexively about how difference impacts social relations and individual
lives. 3) Third, finishing the department’s final project, curriculum, or
internship requirement for the MA program may necessitate creating a
relationship of intellectual, writing, and emotional support with another peer.
This collaborative project may lead to creating a meaningful and lasting
relationship. 4) Finally, students will learn how to write about and
discuss images and topics that are often disturbing and controversial in an
accessible, collegial manner.

Taken as a whole, student portfolios would
work as an interdisciplinary project of cultural, historical, and visual
analysis. Of the presentation of their images outside of the written portion,
students in the class would: Host an exhibition open to the campus
community where pairs of students will discuss their images and how the images
demonstrate the material effects of racialization. The format of the reception
is similar to that of an art exhibition, therefore, while you are required to
speak about your art installation and prepare, your discussion of the project
will constitute informal conversations with interested spectators. In fact, if
it seems applicable, part of your participation at the reception (and in your
written pages) might take into account how you would teach your visual
representations in a cultural and historical context to students in secondary
education or in a professional sphere. If you were a high school teacher,
journalist, librarian, archivist, or grant writer for the National Endowment for
Humanities, how would you discuss these images and their impact to your
students, constituents, or readers for educational purposes?

Every
student was responsible for writing up his or her own findings. Students split
their research, written, and visual work 50/50 and signed a contract that
identified their topic, the commercial and/or documentary photographs under
examination, and the responsibility of each student for portions of the writing
assignment. Most significant, is that in their collaboration with another peer
on the project students would exchange their ideas on race, ethnicity, and
nation with each other, thus providing an alternative intellectual space in
addition to formal class time. In their production of the portfolios, they would
concentrate their energies on the final project, the research, and developing an
intellectual relationship with a peer. Given Italian theorist Vilfredo Pareto’s
20/80 Distributive Law Theory used in Organizational and Business and Economics Theory, that is, that 20 percent of the workers do 80 percent of the work, group
work certainly has its limitations. (19) However, by placing the students in
dyads and requiring each student to designate specific sections of the
assignment to complete, for the most part, it curtailed issues that arise in
collective intellectual ventures. This was one of the successes of the
assignment.

There were a variety of responses by student-colleagues. One
student wrote to me after the exhibit noting that s/he: felt strongly that
the exercise was well worth the effort on the part of the students. I liked the
whole idea ... and the entire idea/selection of the final project should
certainly remain in the flow of this class. It really culminated what we learned
both educationally and also as presenters of information. I think as students
start to move out of the context of academia and go out into occupations that
will force them to prepare and present information, this will have been a very
worthwhile exercise.

Indeed, many were excited about creating their
project after reading the essays and texts on race, ethnicity, nation, trauma,
and collective memory, expressing that Without Sanctuary in particular was “the
most interesting thing they had ever thought about,” “a powerful way to begin
and end a course,” and a useful opportunity to integrate “visual and
intellectual analysis.” Others felt uncomfortable in viewing the images and
reading the text in Without Sanctuary, because of its (in their view)
coffee-table-book-aesthetic that might desensitize its audience through
inundation of the images. Some expressed that the images and text in Without
Sanctuary made them feel ashamed, but purposely wanted to confront issues of
shame with their own juxtaposed visual installations. A few students struggled
with the difference between historical analysis (situating the image in time and
space) and cultural analysis (examining the cultural values, norms, and
practices from which the image speaks to) in their research and initial writings
about their visual images. Yet, most of these problems withered as they
collaboratively worked with their learning partner and had the opportunity to
exchange their own historical knowledge, delved into researching the images, and
made sense of their own meanings and interpretations throughout the semester.
The deconstruction of the images' aesthetic qualities came the easiest to
students, and they wrote their self-reflexive analyses in a thoughtful and
introspective manner. Since the assignment encouraged students to explore areas
of race, ethnicity, and nation that interested them, they could in effect make
sense out of our reading material by pursuing what captivated them
intellectually and personally. Those who felt distanced from the Without
Sanctuary collection found that their skepticism of the use of visual images
actually prodded them to carefully think through how they would discuss their
own chosen photographs.

Students’ projects speak volumes about the
benefits of writing analytically about material forms of racialization via
photography and visual images. For example, a variety of topics were
enthusiastically covered by students, including: images of Boston busing,
American flag imagery, school desegregation, the Persian Gulf War, child
violence and hunger, the American Indian Movement and Indian genocide, Chicano
murals and suicide, and genital mutilation in Africa. The night of the
class’ exhibition, students explained their installations to the class, and while
they spoke, we listened to the musical selection they chose to accompany their
projects. Students spoke of the significance of their choice of music as
necessary framing for their visual images and research. A diverse array of
music, including African, classical, jazz, folk, heavy metal, and R&B
presented aural landscapes of meaning for student/co-teachers and interested
spectators. In addition, students shared how they came to see their visual
images as invoking trauma on a minority collective in a substantial way. Nearly
all students included that their feelings of the images changed over the weeks
of the semester, growing deeper as they had to articulate what emotion, or lack
of emotion, the visual texts posed to them as citizens. As each group presented
on their projects, they became the teachers in the course, and had the
opportunity, via the images, to explain what race meant to them, and what they
believed was credible documentation of racialization, which necessitated a
collective response by a minority group. In this evening—in this sustained two
and one half hour space—race became more than a social construct—race became
real.

Conclusion

In Dwayne Wiggins’ 2000 remake of Billie
Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit,” “What’s Really Going On’--Strange Fruit ,” he
reinterprets the song as a metaphor for modern manifestations of lynching. He
uses the example of being ‘watched’ by white society and the problem of police
brutality experienced disproportionately by Black men on a day-to-day basis for
his re-interpretive claims. For Wiggins, the lynch mob’s rope has morphed into
racial profiling and subsequent harassment, both physical and mental. His lyrics
convey that while 21st century racism is different from 19th and early 20th
century racism, the ideology of assuming Black Americans as always-already
guilty and mistrustful remains intact. This is apparent in the following stanzas
and chorus about his own experience with law enforcement and mainstream society:

Looked into my rearview Someone is watchin’ me and you I
knew it had to be the man He told me, “Turn off your car” I was
breakin’ no laws So why’d you have to put your hands on me? Southern
trees bear strange fruit (Hey, hey, hey) Blood on the leaves, blood on the
roots Society, there’s no truth Tell me what's really goin’ on
(Yeah).

Wiggins’s modern lynch odes situate lynching as a current rather
than a past occurrence. Just being, as he informs, is a source of alarm in the
eye’s of law enforcement—just being a Black man “rollin’ down the street” can
incite humiliating detainments and near death beatings. What is most striking
about his account is that as much as academicians can theorize and write about
race, trauma, and collective memory, “What is Really Going On--Strange Fruit” is
happening in the streets as we write and as we teach. As learners and
co-teachers, perhaps our biggest hurdle to overcome is taking the next step from
learning new ways of seeing and interpreting to changing the social relations
that surround us, which must indelibly start with the self. In her exhibit
review of Without Sanctuary, cultural critic Dora Apel reminds that the lynch
mob mentality directed at Black Americans remains, as seen and documented in
recent hate crimes. She also notes that the term itself, that is lynching, is a
floating signifier with multiple and expansive meanings. (21) Understanding,
revisiting, and teaching about lynching and modern manifestations of race,
trauma, and collective memory should think through how to combat it by
recognizing and aborting its current psychology. Some of this work might entail
what sociologist Michael Ashmore describes as self-reflexive writing practice in
the humanities and social sciences: “wrighting.” Ashmore’s relevant articulation
marks the integration of writing resistance and writing to right to produce
transformative intellectual work that encourages an increase in consciousness,
accountability, and pro-action. This scholarly writing strategy admirably and
respectfully represents the fundamental connection between the social struggles
that affect us all as responsible citizens to our everyday practices.
“Wrighting” therefore has the potential to hail readers to read with compassion
and self-reflexivity to know, place, and position the self, and to dare to act
justly on a day-to-day basis in an unjust world. (22)

In a poem about
Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit,” titled “Canary,” the Black poet Rita Dove
writes of the relationship between knowing, self, and community. Dove’s mix of
prose and metaphor show how Billie Holiday’s music as enunciated in her voice
and performance was infused with contradictions, her experiences, growing
consciousness of the world around her, and despair in the seemingly limited
opportunities for change in US race relations. Dove writes:

Billie
Holiday’s burned voicehad as many shadows as lights, a mournful
candelabra against a sleek piano the gardenia her signature under that
ruined face. […] Fact is, the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service myth. If you can’t be free, be a
mystery. (23)

The candelabra of light and sultry voice and performance
of Billie Holiday in her song “Strange Fruit” bears an underlying subtext of
race, trauma, and collective memory. Her voice of protest is one that we must
not forget; her subject matter is one that we must continue to teach and try to
understand; her melancholy performance is one that should incite action against,
as Dwayne Wiggins’ reminds, “What is Really Going On/Strange Fruit” in our
everyday lives. Billie Holiday's explication of strange fruit, James Allen’s
exhibition of lynching photography, and a caring pedagogy show that to live
without sanctuary produces a yearning to “wright” of and for it, and to live
with sanctuary bears a responsibility to extend it in the global, national, and
local spaces we defend as and call home.

End Notes

(1) I paraphrased and condensed these two accounts of
lynchings by Leon Litwack (Laura Nelson’s story) and James Allen (Mary Turner’s
story) from the hardbound installation catalogue book Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America .

(8) Bakhtin explains carnival as the site where power,
sex, and racial relations transverse, transpose, and converge into a site of
disassembled social protocol. See Bakhtin, 1983. On lynch crowd looking politics
see also Esteve, 2003.

[9] Litwack, 2000.

(10) Als, 2000.

(11)
Ibid.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Alexander, 1994.

(14) Allen, 2000.

(15) Ibid.

(16) Kiang, 2001.

(17) See for example the documentary,
Shattering the Silences (1997) on faculty of color in the academy and Skin Deep
(1995) on college campus racism and racial and ethnic reconciliation, both
available from California Newsreel, 149 9th Street San Francisco, CA 94103. See
also Freydberg, 1993; Wright Myers, 2002; Lim ed., 2000); Padilla ed., 1995);
Mihesuah and Wilson, ed., 2003.

(18) Freire, 1970.

(19) Pareto,
1968.

(20) Apel, 2003.

(21) Apel, 2003.

(22) Some of this
important work is already underway. For example, on October 3-6 2003 a
conference on lynching at Emory University included one paper that was
explicitly about Black women lynched: Renee Ater, University of Maryland,
College Park “Visualizing a Woman Lynched: Meta Warrick Fuller and Mary Turner:
A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence” and a panel: Artistic Responses to
Lynching and Racial Violence: Black Women Playwrights. This panel explored the
subject of lynching as written about by Black women playwrights. Presenters
included: Koritha Mitchell, University of Maryland, College Park, “A Different
Kind of Strange Fruit’: Understanding Lynching Drama by Black Women,” Barbara
Brewster Lewis, New York University, “Rehearsing Citizenship: Three Early
Twentieth-Century Lynching Dramas by African-American Women,” and Judith L.
Stephens, Penn State University, “Georgia Douglas Johnson's Lynching Dramas.” On
the term “wrighting” see Ashmore, 1989.

Contact Us

Deborah
Whaley, Ph.D., teaches in the Africana Studies Program at the University of
Arizona. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in American
Studies in 2002, a M.A. in American Studies for California State University,
Fullerton, and B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Santa
Cruz. Dr. Whaley is a contributor to the anthologies The Legacy and the Vision:
A Critical Look at African American Fraternities and Sororities , Tamara Brown
[et al] (Kentucky 2005); and Fields Watered With Blood: Critical Essays on
Margaret Walker, Maryemma Graham ed., (Georgia 2001). Whaley has published in
the journals Contours, American Studies, and 49th Parallel. Currently, Dr.
Whaley is completing a book manuscript about the cultural and public sphere work
of Black sororities.

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